A little behind the scenes of the Q2Q Christmas period

Client: All of our clients with Fortigate firewalls!

This month, we look at not just one client but multiple clients and how Q2Q work tirelessly behind the scenes to maintain and update our clients’ IT equipment.

What was the challenge?

Whilst being closed on the bank holidays over the Christmas period, we do open on the days in between, and as quite a few of our clients are closed throughout or have a lot of staff taking leave, it is often a fairly quiet time at Q2Q HQ.

We see this as the perfect opportunity to catch up with background tasks that often require system downtime, allowing us to get jobs done without any impact on clients.  One of these important tasks is ensuring all of our clients’ FortiGate firewalls are up-to-date and ready for the new year.

What action did we take?

An En masse upgrade of all Fortigate firewall appliances was planned for this time window. This involved research into which models each client had, which version of software they were currently running, and which updates were available. Some devices would be going to the next major release, so time was also spent checking to ensure these updates were bug-free and not likely to cause more problems than solutions!

While a lot of our clients were tucking into cold turkey sandwiches and bubble and squeak, the rollout of updates was delivered, and each device got its own belated Christmas present of shiny new update packages!

What effect did it have on the clients?

These devices, which are often on and running 24/7, are now benefiting from improved performance, reinforced protections against newly discovered vulnerabilities and increased reliability, having had a fresh reboot to clear out the cobwebs.

Most units were upgraded via our FortiManager unit. This is a clever server hosted in the Azure cloud. Our engineers can use this as a central administration point for all client Fortigate’s. We can select and schedule Firmware upgrades for completion out of hours and deploy the correct updates to the correct devices.